Read the text below and answer questions 1-13.
Why Are Finland’s Schools Successful?
The country’s achievements in education have other nations doing their homework
A. At Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a suburb west of Helsinki, Kari Louhivuori, the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a recent immigrant, was falling behind, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. So he decided to hold the boy back a year. Standards in the country have vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade, in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. ‘I took Besart on that year as my private student,' explains Louhivuori. When he was not studying science, geography and math, Besart was seated next to Louhivuori's desk, taking books from a tall stack, slowly reading one, then another, then devouring them by the dozens. By the end of the year, he had conquered his adopted country’s vowel-rich language and arrived at the realization that he could, in fact, learn.
B. This tale of a single rescued child hints at some of the reasons for Finland’s amazing record of education success. The transformation of its education system began some 40 years ago but teachers had little idea it had been so successful until 2000. In this year, the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15yearolds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best at reading in the world. Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of the 57 nations that participate in science. In the latest PISA scores, the nation came second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide.
C. In the United States, government officials have attempted to improve standards by introducing marketplace competition into public schools. In recent years, a group of Wall Street financiers and philanthropists such as Bill Gates have put money behind private sector ideas, such as charter schools, which have doubled in number in the past decade. President Obama, too, apparently thought competition was the answer. One policy invited states to compete for federal dollars using tests and other methods to measure teachers, a philosophy that would not be welcome in Finland. ‘I think, in fact, teachers would tear off their shirts,’ said Timo Heikkinen, a Helsinki principal with 24 years of teaching experience. ‘If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.’
D. There are no compulsory standardized tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There is no competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. The people in the government agencies running them, from national officials to local authorities, are educators rather than business people or politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university trained educators. The result is that a Finnish child has a good chance of getting the same quality education no matter whether he or she lives in a rural village or a university town.
E. It’s almost unheard of for a child to show up hungry to school. Finland provides three years of maternity leave and subsidized day care to parents, and preschool for all five-year-olds, where the emphasis is on socializing. In addition, the state subsidizes parents, paying them around 150 euros per month for every child until he or she turns 17. Schools provide food, counseling and taxi service if needed. Health care Is even free for students taking degree courses.
F. Finland’s schools were not always a wonder. For the first half of the twentieth century, only the privileged got a quality education. But In 1963, the Finnish Parliament made the bold decision to choose public education as the best means of driving the economy forward and out of recession. Public schools were organized into one system of comprehensive schools for ages 7 through 16. Teachers from all over the nation contributed to a national curriculum that provided guidelines, not prescriptions, for them to refer to. Besides Finnish and Swedish (the country’s second official language), children started learning a third language (English Is a favorite) usually beginning at age nine. The equal distribution of equipment was next, meaning that all teachers had their fair share of teaching resources to aid learning. As the comprehensive schools Improved, so did the upper secondary schools (grades 10 through 12). The second critical decision came In 1979, when it was required that every teacher gain a fifth-year Master’s degree In theory and practice, paid for by the state. From then on, teachers were effectively granted equal status with doctors and lawyers. Applicants began flooding teaching programs, not because the salaries were so high but because autonomous decision-making and respect made the job desirable. And as Louhivuori explains, ‘We have our own motivation to succeed because we love the work.’
Read the text below and answer questions 14-26.
Australia's Lost Giants
A. The Victorian Cave was explored by a fossil hunter named Rod Wells, who came to Naracoorte, South Australia, in 1969. The narrow passages, which were distinctly clawed, led to huge chambers. The ground had red soil, and the floor was bedraggled with strange objects. It took Wells a moment to acknowledge that what he was checking out were the bones of thousands of animals that might have fallen from openings in the ground above and gotten stuck. Compared to the mammals found today in Australia, some of the oldest were far more sizable. These bones belonged to Australian megafauna—giant mammals of the Pleistocene epoch. Across the continent, in boneyards, fossils of a giant snake, a huge flightless bird, and a seven-foot kangaroo, to give some examples, were discovered by scientists. Considering the amount of light cast on the extinction of the dinosaurs, it's surprising that a little has been discovered about megafauna. Prehistoric humans never harmed Tyrannosaurus rex with spears, although they did hunt mammoths and mastodons.
B. Soon after the arrival of humans, the extinction of megafauna in America, including mammoths, saber-toothed cats, and gigantic sloths, occurred around 13,000 years ago. A paleoecologist named Paul Martin published a hypothesis known as the "blitzkrieg hypothesis" in the 1960s. Modern people caused chaos in the Americas by killing animals with spears. These animals had never seen a smart predator before, so they couldn't defend themselves.But this period of extinction was not complete. On the continent, North America retained its deer, black bears, and a small type of bison, and on the continent, South America had its jaguars and llamas.
C. It is confounding to witness the melancholy of Australia's large animals. For quite a long time, researchers put aside any other causes for extinction other than environmental changes. To be sure, Australia has been drying out for more than 1,000,000 years, and the megafauna were confronted with a landmass where vegetation had started to vanish. Tim Flannery, an Australian paleontologist, proposed that people who moved onto the continent around 50 centuries ago used fire to hunt. This was accompanied by deforestation. Something worrisome occurred to Australia's predominant land animals-somewhere around 46,000 years ago, not long after the intrusion of a profoundly wise hunter with excellent tools.
D. The controversy over megafauna revolves around the methods for dating old bones and the sediments in which they are buried. Only if scholars can demonstrate that the extinction of megafauna occurred within a few centuries, or possibly a couple thousand years, of the emergence of humans would the argument be strengthened-regardless of whether it was merely coincidental. Cuddie Springs in New South Wales can demonstrate this case without a shadow of a doubt. Judith Field, an archaeologist, is currently the most vocal. In 1991, she discovered megafauna bones as well as stone tools. This was a significant discovery. She claims there are two strata displaying the affiliation, one around 30,000 years old and the other around 35,000 years old. This suggests that people and megafauna coexisted in Australia for at least 20 thousand years. "What Cuddie Springs reveals is that you have a long cross-over of people and megafauna that existed together," Field added. Critics argue that the original locations of fossils were altered and were replaced by younger sediments.
E. Another renowned boneyard in a similar area is a spot called Wellington Caverns,Diprotodon, the largest known marsupial (an animal that, like kangaroos and koalas, bears its young in a pouch), was discovered.In 1830 a regional officer, George Rankin lowered down himself into the cave utilizing a rope snared to a hole in a cave wall. The hole was actually a bone. 12 months later a surveyor, Thomas Mitchell examined the caves in the area and gave Richard Owen, British paleontologist , who was recognised later for unraveling the existence of dinosaurs. extinct marsupial’s cave bones were found in Wellington. In 1909 and 1915 sediments in Mammoth Cave that consisted of fossils were dug out and studied in haphazard manner as a result of this no scolar agreed with these findings. Yet, a single bone particularly captured dramatic attention : a femur with a wound in it, possibly left there by a sharp tool.
F. Sadly, the Earth conserves its history in a chaotic manner.Bones degrade , the land erodes, the climate changes, the mere existence of forests is uncertain , rivers change their course and the history slowly gets disguised. Sadly, the Earth conserves its history in a chaotic manner. The storys constructed from time to time have limited information. Various rock art portrayed Australia's first people. The paintings of Palorchestes, a megafauna marsupial , on rock, in far northern Australia, was examined by Peter Murray, a Paleontologist. In Western Australia another site shows what seems to be a hunter with either a marsupial lion ; in the more recent historical era, the marsupial lion went extinct as they were bigger. "Every stage of the procedure requires analysis. The information does not speak for itself." said Murray .
Read the text below and answer questions 27-40.
The Swiffer
For a fascinating tale about creativity, look at a cleaning product called the Swiffer and how it came about, urges writer Jonah Lehrer. In the story of the Swiffer, he argues, we have the key elements in producing breakthrough ideas: frustration, moments of insight and sheer hard work. The story starts with a multinational company which had invented products for keeping homes spotless, and couldn't come up with better ways to clean floors, so it hired designers to watch how people cleaned. Frustrated after hundreds of hours of observation, they one day noticed a woman do with a paper towel what people do all the time: wipe something up and throw it away. An idea popped into lead designer Harry West's head: the solution to their problem was a floor mop with a disposable cleaning surface. Mountains of prototypes and years of teamwork later, they unveiled the Swiffer, which quickly became a commercial success.
Lehrer, the author of Imagine, a new book that seeks to explain how creativity works, says this study of the imagination started from a desire to understand what happens in the brain at the moment of sudden insight. 'But the book definitely spiraled out of control,' Lehrer says. 'When you talk to creative people, they'll tell you about the 'eureka'* moment, but when you press them they also talk about the hard work that comes afterwards, so I realised I needed to write about that, too. And then I realised I couldn't just look at creativity from the perspective of the brain, because it's also about the culture and context, about the group and the team and the way we collaborate.'
When it comes to the mysterious process by which inspiration comes into your head as if from nowhere, Lehrer says modern neuroscience has produced a 'first draft' explanation of what is happening in the brain. He writes of how burnt out American singer Bob Dylan decided to walk away from his musical career in 1965 and escape to a cabin in the woods, only to be overcome by a desire to write. Apparently 'Like a Rolling Stone' suddenly flowed from his pen. 'It's like a ghost is writing a song,' Dylan has reportedly said. 'It gives you the song and it goes away.' But it's no ghost, according to Lehrer.
Instead, the right hemisphere of the brain is assembling connections between past influences and making something entirely new. Neuroscientists have roughly charted this process by mapping the brains of people doing word puzzles solved by making sense of remotely connecting information For instance, subjects are given three words such as 'age', 'mile' and 'sand' and asked to come up with a single word that can precede or follow each of them to form a compound word. (It happens to be 'stone'.) Using brain imaging equipment, researchers discovered that when people get the answer in an apparent flash of insight, a small fold of tissue called the anterior superior temporal gyrus suddenly lights up just beforehand. This stays silent when the word puzzle is solved through careful analysis. Lehrer says that this area of the brain lights up only after we've hit the wall on a problem. Then the brain starts hunting through the 'filing cabinets of the right hemisphere' to make the connections that produce the right answer.
Studies have demonstrated it's possible to predict a moment of insight up to eight seconds before it arrives. The predictive signal is a steady rhythm of alpha waves emanating from the brain's right hemisphere, which are closely associated with relaxing activities. 'When our minds are at ease when those alpha waves are rippling through the brain we're more likely to direct the spotlight of attention towards that stream of remote associations emanating from the right hemisphere,' Lehrer writes. 'In contrast, when we are diligently focused, our attention tends to be towards the details of the problems we are trying to solve.' In other words, then we are less likely to make those vital associations. So, heading out for a walk or lying down are important phases of the creative process, and smart companies know this. Some now have a policy of encouraging staff to take time out during the day and spend time on things that at first glance are unproductive (like playing a PC game), but daydreaming has been shown to be positively correlated with problem-solving. However, to be more imaginative, says Lehrer, it's also crucial to collaborate with people from a wide range of backgrounds because if colleagues are too socially intimate, creativity is stifled.
Creativity, it seems, thrives on serendipity. American entrepreneur Steve Jobs believed so. Lehrer describes how at Pixar Animation, Jobs designed the entire workplace to maximise the chance of strangers bumping into each other, striking up conversations and learning from one another. He also points to a study of 766 business graduates who had gone on to own their own companies. Those with the greatest diversity of acquaintances enjoyed far more success. Lehrer says he has taken all this on board, and despite his inherent shyness, when he's sitting next to strangers on a plane or at a conference, forces himself to initiate conversations. As for predictions that the rise of the Internet would make the need for shared working space obsolete, Lehrer says research shows the opposite has occurred; when people meet face-to-face, the level of creativity increases. This is why the kind of place we live in is so important to innovation. According to theoretical physicist Geoffrey West, when corporate institutions get bigger, they often become less receptive to change. Cities, however, allow our ingenuity to grow by pulling huge numbers of different people together, who then exchange ideas. Working from the comfort of our homes may be convenient, therefore, but it seems we need the company of others to achieve our finest 'eureka' moments.
Glossary:
Eureka: In ancient Greek, the meaning was ‘I have found!’. Now it can be used when people suddenly find the solution to a difficult problem and want to celebrate